We do with our lives what we can. And then we die. What else is there?

If anything ever does work in my case chance, and what I call ‘accident’ takes over.

Gamble everything on the next brush stroke…different strokes trying to do something else then develop themselves

How are you going to trap reality? How are you going to trap an appearance without making an illustration of it?

Colour of meat is beautiful

Issues for my printmaking:

Feeling the form as it emerges – particularly with monoprint or inking collagraph plates. One thing can turn into another.

Can work from photographs for portraits. But observe – Bacon could not draw.

Shadows do not need to relate to a subject – making them different can create considerable tension

his tryptichs ‘don’t relate to each other, but they play off one another…the balance seems better with three’

Key images

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 The work’s exhibition in April 1945 coincided with the release of the first photographs and film footage of the Nazi concentration camps. (Tate Modern website)Triptych August 1972. This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. (Tate Modern website)Study for a self-portrait. Also known as Businessman I 1952 or Man’s Head 1952